Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Solid state drive (SSD) technology is rapidly replacing hard disk drive (HDD) as non-volatile memory of choice in data centers and other environments. SSD based storage options may provide advantages over legacy storage solutions ranging from faster data access to increased data throughput. The scalability of SSDs to petabytes and above demands dedicated hardware and software to address various challenges associated with legacy architectures. For example, scalability may be limited due to a communication bottleneck arising from housekeeping tasks associated with flash memory. Storage tasks such as redundant array of independent disks (RAID), backup, deduplication, defragmentation, garbage collection, and others may utilize substantial processing and networking resources available to an SSD.
Scalability of SSDs may also be limited by the need to maintain association between metadata and data. Maintaining a coherent and updated description of the data may be challenging or non-practical while scaling legacy SSD implementations. Yet another limitation on scaling of SSDs may include scaling of input and output (I/O) bandwidth with flash memory associated with an SSD controller.